Daisy Rockwell paints under the takhallus, or alias, Lapata (pronounced 'láh-puht-áh'), which is Urdu for "missing," or "absconded," as in "my luggage is missing," or "the bandits have absconded." She also writes for the blog Chapati Mystery and has posted many of her paintings there. Lapata grew up in a family of artists in western Massachusetts, some whose work adorns the surfaces of chinaware and brightens up the waiting rooms of dentists' offices, and others whose artistic output has found more select audiences. From 1992-2006, Lapata made a detour into Academia, from which she emerged with a PhD in South Asian literature and a mild case of depression. 

She tends to focus on world political figures in human poses, such as sleeping, or holding their pets. As a point of departure for these paintings she searches for news photographs she has found on the internet. She has never invented a pet, except for in one painting, when she gave Mahmud Ahmadinejad a Persian cat. More recently, she has been exploring rasa, the idealized expression of nine possible essential emotions in classical Indian aesthetics, such as anger, erotic love and fear. She is currently working on a large project depicting contemporary rasas, such as depression, irony and cuteness.